Wood boards or sheets, typically made from wood composite products like plywood or oriented strand board, are common construction materials in commercial, industrial and residential buildings. During construction, these boards are placed over and fastened to an underlying supporting frame to form the wall, roof or floor of the building.
While this method of construction is an improvement over other construction techniques, it could nonetheless be made more efficient. A principal drawback to this construction method is that when a worker places the board over the frame, the frame is no longer visible. Thus, in order to fasten or attach the board to the supporting frame it is necessary to add an additional step of measuring and marking positions on the board to align the placement of fasteners (e.g., nails or screws) so that they are directed through the board and into the underlying supporting frame. This additional measuring and marking step is problematic not only because of the time it takes, but also because measurement errors may cause the fasteners to be misaligned and fail to contact the frame. Misaligned fasteners not only decrease construction efficiency because they require that the misaligned fasteners be removed and new fasteners inserted, but also could undermine structural integrity if the worker is unaware of the error or ignores it.
To address this problem, boards have previously been manufactured with patterns on their surface to indicate the dimensions of the board and to indicate to workers using these boards the appropriate places for cutting and mounting the wood boards during construction projects. However, these patterns are typically in the form of a complicated and potentially confusing series of grids formed by a series of intersecting lines as well as other reference indicia. While these complicated patterns allow the boards to be used in a wide variety of building and construction applications they also require more time and effort by an installer to use.
Given the foregoing, there is a continuing need to develop a board comprising a pattern that may be used in many different construction applications, while also facilitating the quick attachment of the board to structural frames without the expenditure of considerable time and effort by the installer.